


in these violet water dreams

by LocketShoru



Category: AdventureQuest Worlds, Saint Seiya, 聖闘士星矢: 冥王神話 | Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas
Genre: Alternate Universe - AQW, Angst, Chaorruption, Chaos Finale Saga, Crossover, Drakath is mentioned, Established Relationship, Gore, M/M, Minos' POV, SkyCaptain!Minos, SkyGuard Saga, Skymyr!Albafica, Songfic, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:40:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24184513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LocketShoru/pseuds/LocketShoru
Summary: He's dying, and he knows it, and the orchestra knows it too. At least he isn't alone, as the world fights one last battle without him.
Relationships: Griffon Minos/Pisces Albafica
Comments: 6
Kudos: 8





	in these violet water dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Is this wildly self-indulgent? Yes. Do I expect anyone save for the other chaorrupted to understand this? No. Do I care about either one of these things? Also no.  
> This isn't my first AQW fic - I was in that fandom for a hell of a lot longer than you'd think, I have over 100k of unpublished fic for it - but it is the first that I'm putting on AO3, because all the others that are semi-okay are all on tumblr, and thus haven't been moved over yet. I'll get there /at some point/. Those of you here from the AQW scene, yes it's me Meilyn, sorry I changed my gender, character development happened.  
> Also, the song is Nightwish's Turn Loose The Mermaids. In my canon, they're called Nightsong. 
> 
> As for context for those who want MiAlba but know fuckall about AQW: Minos is a SkyCaptain of Swordhaven's SkyGuard military division, aka the Good Guys. Think Treasure Planet. They've been fighting a war for the past twenty-thirty-some-odd-years with Sepulchure and his Shadowscythe, which was surprisingly interrupted by Drakath, a pissed off 21yo whose father was dethroned by Swordhaven's current leader (he was crown prince of Swordhaven himself) when he was six, got stuck in the Shadowscythe, supposedly died, came back with an army that he'd stolen and a magical hivemind that nobody had ever seen before and told everyone he was going to summon his 13 Chaos Lords and kill everyone. He did it to stop the fighting, but was being manipulated by a higher power. Minos got accidentally corrupted. Albafica's just a skymyr (effectively skymermaid) who wants to vibe but can't because angst. So yeah.

The music. He had to start with the music, because there was never a place to start without it, and it only made sense to start there. He could have started in so many other places, if he wanted, so many melodies and harmonies and the sound of a snare drum cracking like the first sob of his lover’s weeping. 

It would always be underscored by the music, and now, it felt like that was the last thing they’d ever have. And to be fair, it probably would be. He looked up at the setting sky, red and bleeding and painful as the violet bled into it, a faint veil of night crashing down upon the world around them. He kept his left hand stroking Albafica’s hair, soft and silky even though he knew it wasn’t anything like a human’s. 

Who was he to talk about humanity? Really, who was he to ask after the ones most versatile in this world, the ones who could blend almost seamlessly in anywhere? He’d been forced to let go of the title a fair bit ago, and he’d regretted it, and he hadn’t been able to turn back. There was no way to turn back. He’d regretted it a little more when the open sores wept at the sunset, a little less when those same sores were harder than his armour and deflected more than a few bullets. If he found the dragonscales peeling out from under the skin that was meant to protect his heart, he might actually live through an execution. 

Not that it mattered. Not now. At least Albafica’s soft singing was keeping the pain away, whistles through gills and the low groan of the breaking skyship he’d come from. 

“I heard a few days ago,” Albafica began quietly, his gills still humming a melody that didn’t match the one in Minos’ mind. “That the chaorrupted can speak to each other in their minds. Are you able to…?”

He shook his head, a stiff motion which was more energy than he really had to spare. “I could try again, but I’ve been calling for the past hour. All I can hear through the network is the music, and Chaos doesn’t let me sing off-key. I’m stuck on whatever course they chart for us, my love. I only wish you didn’t have to see it.”

Albafica’s laugh was brutal and quiet, and it was the mooring at a familiar pirate port, that promised dangers he already knew of, that would never promise safety but the closest thing to it. He’d always been enamoured, and if love could be a facsimile of magical corrupted, he would’ve been too far gone for the Chaos to ensnare him. But alas, love didn’t make the world turn, and Drakath the crown prince would never allow it to. 

He knew what happened to him. He’d known the first moment it had reached for his magic what had happened. A thrilling orchestra of a tale, as brave and bright as any one of them, and ah, his music was the punk-rock of Lorestockapalooza in its prime, and if he’d screamed at the sound it was in tune with it all. The only thing that hadn’t sliced so cleanly through him was Albafica’s song, and it was taking his every drop of mana just to keep the Chaos away from it. His lover sung a song of healing, of dulling the pain, and if it could capture an echo and send it through the network to ease everyone’s pain, it was going to. But it would ensnare him even deeper first, slip its violet rot through his every artery and render his will nothing but a vessel for its power before he allowed that. 

On some level, he knew it was trying to be kind. It didn’t like letting them die, didn’t like their deaths being pointless. Until he accepted that there was no cure for these scars, he wasn’t going to get help from the hivemind threatening everything he’d ever loved. If it weren’t for his lover’s song on the winds, he already would have given it up. Maybe it should never have been about the music. 

Albafica sat up, shifting onto one fluke and adjusting Minos’ position. Minos leaned onto him, careful to keep his right side away from him, careful to keep him away from the rot. If he never brushed against it, he wouldn’t be hurt. He wouldn’t be broken by it, the way Minos was trying not to be, the way he already was. It was ending, one way or another, tonight. It was ending in a way he knew even Albafica could feel it. He was attuned to the Chaos, and his lover was more magic than a human could be. He’d be able to feel the ending tonight as sure as Minos did, and it would be only slightly less understandable to him. 

“Do you know what’s going on out there?” he asked, and the fins where ears might be were tilted at an angle of curiosity, of worry, and he could taste the sorrow of him on the air. “Everyone scattered hours ago… I know there’s a battle, but that’s it.”

Minos answered first by leaning into his chest, of listening to the turbulence of the air as he breathed. He was still humming a sirensong, and good for it, because Minos wouldn’t have made it this far without it. He answered second by actually responding, tasting the Chaos sweetly destroying him bit by bit until he knew the story. Stories and music and incandescent heroes. All that ever mattered was that you were true, and fate was kind. He knew it wouldn’t be. 

“It’s the finale, they’re calling it,” he said, and he could feel the rot slice a little deeper, bleed his magic a little more into something tainted. “Drakath has his thirteen Lords of Chaos - they claimed the final one earlier today. He’s opening the Chaotic Gate, and he’ll bathe the world in Chaos.”

He paused to laugh, a painful slice of a thing, and he could feel Albafica’s horror, and he didn’t bother looking up. “Nobody ever told him he’d regret every step, but we’re all on this course, there isn’t any going back now. Nobody ever told him that the Avatar didn’t know, either.”

Albafica’s song intensified, his humming more sorrowful, desperate. He forced his head to shake, to clear out the violet mists that were slipping in between his thoughts. He focused on his lover until his sirensong shifted back to its original volume.

“What?” he asked. 

“Your hair was turning black and curly at the ends,” he said quietly. “When you were talking. It was like the Chaos wanted you to be a clone of the man.”

His laughter bubbled out of him, unhinged and sorrowful. He hadn’t realized just how far gone he was. “It likes doing that. It’s easy to disappear into the Chaotic Fleet if anyone can be you, and you can be anyone. It’s the only way to understand someone else’s sorrow. I don’t think they ever counted on some of us not wanting to.”

He leaned his temple against Albafica’s collarbone, allowing himself to cast his gaze down his lover’s body. It usually annoyed him, but… Minos was dying, if he allowed himself to admit it. Either the Chaos would hollow him out and use his corpse for its own benefit, or he would bleed out from his injuries. For all he knew, one would lead to the other in short order, and his lover’s only safety would be the sky this damn rock was marooned to.

Albafica’s skin was pale, almost inhumanly so, soft cream shifting into cloudy white-blue somewhere around his navel, skin into scales and a thick tail some twenty feet long, decorated with flukes and fins and a dorsal that implied what he actually was. His hair fell to a few feet past his hips, sky-blue and bright and well-taken-care-of. He had open gills on his throat and his neck, and membranes between every finger to the first knuckle. His eyes were the deep, true blue of midnight, starless and fine by him, because the only stars he’d need to guide his way in that blue sang to him in a way Chaos could never have mimicked.

“I see you staring, you know,” Albafica murmured, and Minos smiled with a twitch of one cheek, raw and desperate and yearning.

“Please, Alba. Allow this dying man the pleasure of knowing you were here with him, once.” Albafica only shifted closer at his words, and his song intensified, his eyes closing to focus on the melody that might stave off the end another hour, another minute, another fragment of a second before he was gone. 

In that song, he could feel memories, helpfully replayed in his mind by the chaorruption slipping through his right side and his magic. The long days at the Academy, some forty-seven recruits strong when they started and eighteen when they were done, dead or missing-presumed-dead or deserters who he hoped to Lorithia were still alive. It wasn’t likely. Not after so long of an endless war, and Drakath knew how to play the waiting game. It was all he knew how to play, really, forcing the peace by being a more horrific monster than even Sepulchure could’ve dreamed.

And wasn’t that something, when the Lord of Darkness couldn’t recruit the greater monster to his cause. All the years he spent learning to fight him, learning to sail the skies and take apart a Steel Albatross and a few homemade explosives, warding off pirates and Shadowscythe alike. The fighting was glorious, it was hell on earth, and he had seen far too many innocents die. And yet.

And yet the skies were still vast and endless and broken only by the high cliffs of the Skyborne, of occasional floating islands and moored ports held up by magic and far too much effort. And yet the stars were far too many to count in swirls and cloudy patterns, and he knew their every constellation and the stories behind them, and the songs they sang. And still he had never once found the migrating skymyr to be anything less than a once-in-a-lifetime sight, even though he saw it every season, even though he’d followed them for miles on the open air. Even though on more than one occasion he’d been a part of the pack, sailing along the wind currents, because nobody touched the migrating skymyr if they were anything slightly smarter than a rock.

Because sometimes he’d ended up mooring his ship to a rock and allowing them to crash on his deck for the few hours they got to sleep, when there wasn’t anything better. And somewhere in there, he had spoken with their leaders as so few skycaptains did, had earned their trust, had eventually had one moglinberry ale too many and all but fell into the arms of the youngest prince who might had survived if he hadn’t caught him.

And now… The storms had been heavy. They had been far too heavy where only King Gladius, The’Galen bless her and Lorithia curse her, could have survived. Their ship - for it was as much Albafica’s as it was his own, really - had been thrown into a mountain and crushed, and he had been mostly crushed under it. 

All that was left in the sky was the bleeding red and the veil of violet night, and if there were stars, he couldn’t hear their songs over the Chaos’ corrupted touch. He knew that Albafica wouldn’t leave him, not until his heart had stopped and he was nothing but a corrupted corpse.

He leaned up a little, duly noting how much of his strength that he was losing, and kissed him. Albafica kissed him back with an ear-fin raised and chapped, coarse lips from many a day of hunting, and his mouth opened to allow his skymyr love access to deepen in. His breath was warm and magic-filled, enough to breathe into him, enough to try and use his strength to save them both.

It wouldn’t be enough. He could feel the warm drops of tears begin to splatter against his face. Albafica didn’t cry very often, but he had when Minos had taken a bite from a draconian soldier and caught Chaos’ touch, and he was crying now. Minos reached up with a hand to brush away his tears with his thumb. They kissed through the last of the sunset, until all the bleeding red was gone, until the only thing left to be scarlet at all were the remains of Minos’ leg and hip, still bleeding. They didn’t have anything to patch it with. He was almost sad about it, but he wouldn’t have been the first with a leg of metal and gearboxes, if he was going to live through it.

He broke the kiss to breathe, his hand still on his lover’s cheek. Albafica’s face was reddened, some tears he hadn’t been able to wipe away still falling freely from his face. The chaorruption was slipping deeper into him now, and it wouldn’t be long until he was bleeding violet, too.

“A kite above a graveyard grey,” he murmured, and rested his temple against Albafica’s shoulder, settling into him. “At the end of the line far far away… A child holding on to the magic of birth and awe.”

“Oh, how beautiful it used to be,” Albafica answered, beginning the soft second verse of the song. It was an old lullaby, really a requiem, Nightsong carried through the skies like so many other stars. “Just you and me far beyond the sea… The waters, scarce in motion; quivering still.”

Their voices met in the middle for the chorus, soft and broken and somehow, the violin followed them. “At the end of the river the sundown beams; all the relics of a life long lived… Here, weary traveler rest your wand, sleep the journey from your eyes.”

“Good journey, love, time to go.” Albafica’s voice cracked, breaking, admitting what they both knew was already happening, what they were powerless to stop. “I’ll check your teeth and warm your toes… In the horizon I see them coming for you.”

“The skymyr's grace, the forever call; beauty in spyglass on an old man's porch. The skymyrs I’ve turned loose brought back my tears.” Minos’ voice didn’t waver as much. Maybe he had already accepted it. Maybe he was simply too far gone to be anything but steady.

Minos repeated the chorus, his smile breaking past the song. Albafica repeated it again, his hands finding Minos’ hair and stroking it through, white and straight and covered in mud and grease. Right now, he didn’t care, and when Albafica’s voice faded, he could hear the instrumentals better than anything, an orchestra their ode to life, answering them. The music would come if it thought it needed to, and they had never needed anything more than that.

“At the end of the river, the sundown beams… All the relics of a life long lived,” he murmured again, when the bridge faded to imply his cue.

Albafica’s voice joined his. “Here, weary traveller, rest your wand. Sleep the journey from your eyes.” Albafica’s voice cracked on the last word where Minos’ tone went high. “At the end of the river, the sundown beams.” He tilted his head back to stare up at the sky, his eyes closing, the memory of his lover’s laughter louder than the music. “All the relics of this life well lived!”

“Here, weary traveller, rest your wand, sleep the journey from your eyes.” The orchestra answered them with all but a roar on the wind, his eyes fluttering briefly open. The world was crystalline clear, every star in its place and his lover’s warmth against him. He spared his lover a glance, and took his hand with his uncorrupted one, kissing his knuckles. The orchestra began to fade, and he closed his eyes.

He didn’t feel anything more, and the last thing he heard was a skymyr’s song of soothing sorrow.


End file.
